Stop it with the "thinking man's horror movie" nonsense.

Rating: Null/10 (8 July 2003)

***POSSIBLE SPOILERS*** Some of us plebes munching on popcorn were able to determine that this movie didn't make a lick of sense and that is was not the "horror movie" that the reviews and commercials had promised us. "Scary as hell"??? Huh? "Thinking man's horror movie"??? Puh-leez. First of all, STOP calling it a "zombie movie". There isn't a single zombie in the entire flick. A zombie is a reanimated corpse. The infected victims in this movie don't die and then come back to life; they are simply consumed by an uncontrollable rage. Other "thinking" critics describe the infected as being "zombie cannibals" or "flesh-eating zombies" when it is never established that the infected actually ate human flesh--or ate anything for that matter. They may very well BITE in the same way that a raging dog will but do they even think to eat? Or are they so utterly consumed with rage that they don't notice or recognize hunger? An early scene in which two of the infected are set afire while chasing the protaganist and yet don't waver in their pursuit pretty much establishes that their instinct for self-preservation is gone.
And why don't they attack each other? They seemed to "hunt" in packs which is something that a social animal would do and yet these monsters are infected with a very antisocial rage; a rage so intense that swarms of rats flee the infecteds' approach. Yet the infected operate almost like a gang. People who need people...
As for the film's "man's inhumanity to man" subtext or its exploration of our darker nature and instincts,blah,blah,blah...so what? Haven't you people ever seen a war movie--particularly a Vietnam war movie. These are not new themes and they are not handled with any real panache or originality in this movie. And why do the people in this movie assume that the virus has gone global and that there is "no future". It would be next to impossible for a virus that manifests itself quite vividly within seconds to jump from an island nation like Great Britain to "Paris and New York". Only one character in the entire movie questions the possibility of this and he is a minor character who is chained to a radiator, ignored, and eventually killed. The predicament of the two female characters, who are surrounded by men, hinges on this perception of "no future". It is a perception that the movie failed to acutely convey, in my opinion and I couldn't understand why the characters seemed to have a last-people-on-earth mentality. It seemed inevitable that some "uninfected" country would eventually come to the rescue--as they in fact do. In the meantime, the "infected" become almost peripheral to the numbing story that is being told and I can't figure out for the life of me what people found so scary about this movie. Spare us the sequel.